Pierre Manent may have a different translation, but I found this paragraph from An Intellectual History of Liberalism on the dedicatory letter of The Prince. I find it fascinating, yet didn’t explicitly see the word modern in my translation. Regardless, it’s a theme I see constantly when looking at Machiavelli. The passage is below:
With Machiavelli, it was the modern experience — he speaks of hs lunga esperienza delle cose moderne in his Dedicatory Letter to The Prince (written in 1513) — that found its own expression. In Machiavelli modernity found an interpretation of itself that determined the orientation of the European mind, and hence European political history, from that moment on.